Back from Mexico
I’m just getting back to my desk after a several days in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.
I had a little R & R, played some golf, and just enjoyed myself in general. Had all the same kinds of food I wrote about in a post last year, so I returned well fed. Now I’m tanned, fed, fit and ready to type, so it’s back to the grindstone.
Thanks to the poor economy, this trip was a little more exciting than previous trips. At least the golf part. When we pulled the carts up to the first green on the first day we played, the caddy told us to pull off the cart path and park the carts down by the green. When we asked why, he replied, “Banditos.”
Turns out that hard times have driven many desperate people to turn to crime to feed their families. According to the caddy, ‘banditos’ hide in the jungle along side the cart paths and come out while the players are on the green and steal anything they can get their hands on. A few weeks before we got there, there was an actual armed robbery on the course. Fortunately, our trip was without incident, so I returned home with all my belongings. Didn’t even lose anything to the airlines, which is probably a more likely way to lose valuables than to banditos on the golf course.
A study appeared this week sure to drive members of the low-fat and vegan tribes sprinting for their Protexid.
Synchronicity strikes again. The seeds of this post were sown when Gary Taubes emailed me about a study published in early 2009 in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) that I had seen at the time, briefly skimmed and tossed aside as worthless. Gary agreed that the study was of little value, but notice that it contained a peculiar statement by the authors, an interesting admission about HDL, the lipophobe’s favorite lipoprotein. And not only had the authors made this strange admission, but so had another prominent lipophobe who wrote the accompanying editorial.
In the early 1980s MD and I were laboring away in anonymity in our clinics in Little Rock, Arkansas. By that time I had gone through my thin-to fat-to thin again metamorphosis, and I was starting to treat patients for obesity. My own transformation had been fairly striking, a fact not lost on many of my overweight patients, a number of whom were seeking my professional advice on treating their own weight problems. I was still doing a fair amount of general primary care medicine, but more and more of my time was being diverted to helping people lose weight.
